Post navigation

The Worms Crawl In, The Worms Crawl Out…

I promised to tell you today why the Slumlord’s House was the worst place I’ve ever lived, and I must admit I’m a little tentative about sharing this with you because I know I’ll probably sound like a kook. But I’m just going to rip it off like a Band-Aid. The Slumlord’s House was haunted. There. I said it. Please withhold judgment until you read what happened. (If by chance it wasn’t actually haunted, then it was the freakiest house ever for several reasons.)

The very first morning we woke up in the Slumlord’s House, we found hundreds of dead, crunchy worms on the dining room floor. (And every single morning thereafter, we woke up to at least 200 dead worms. Once we were away for a week and came home to thousands of dead worms, so many that you couldn’t even see the floor in places!) They crawled in every night and died. I have no explanation for this and have never heard of anything like this before. But let me tell you, it was gross!

The doorbell didn’t work when we moved into the Slumlord’s House. Yet, every so often my son, my sister, or I would awaken to the loud, very distinct sound of a doorbell ringing. It was so loud when it happened that it sounded as if it were in each of our bedrooms. Actually it sounded like someone was standing next to your head with a large gong, and after the initial ring, there would be a long echo of the reverberation! It generally only happened at night, and when it did, it usually would interrupt a deep sleep. Quite often, I’d immediately bolt up, thinking someone was actually next to my bed causing the ruckus. But when it happened, it only happened to one of us at a time.

We had a late night guest once who was in the living room alone while my sister and I were in the kitchen. He suddenly called out, “I’ll get it,” and we went in the living room to see what he was talking about. He got up to answer the doorbell and of course found that there was no one there. He swore up and down that there hadn’t been a doorbell on TV, but we knew what had happened.

Several months after we moved in, my son fixed the actual doorbell, and as it turned out, it sounded nothing like the doorbell each of us heard. Plus the “ghost bell” kept ringing after that, as well. Still, the worms crawled in and died.

We had two cats at the time we lived there, Miles who was very fat, and Zsa Zsa who was super fluffy. These cats generally slept with my sister, and their litter box was in her bathroom. Both my son and I kept our bedroom doors closed when we slept. And the cats had both always previously loved to be on the couches with us when we were in the living room.

However, soon after we moved into the Slumlord’s House, Miles lost all his weight and became a bag of bones, and Zsa Zsa lost all of her beautiful, long hair! Both cats refused to leave the floor under the TV. They no longer would get on the couches, nor would they sleep with Michelle. They raced to her room to use their box, then ran back to their spot under the TV. When we finally moved a year later, Miles gained back his weight and Zsa Zsa’s fur grew back within the first month! They both immediately went back to sleeping with Michelle and sitting with us on the furniture, and they both started playing again and running throughout the new house. During the year, more and more worms still crawled in and died.

During the time we lived there, we never told anyone what we were experiencing. We didn’t want them to think we were crazy, and we were also embarrassed about the nasty worms. (By the way, we checked all the door seals, and they seemed fine. To this day, we don’t know why those worms wanted in, nor why they died once they entered. At one point we jokingly wondered if there was a dead body underneath our house!)

I was often “pinned” in my bed. It felt like someone was sitting on the bed leaning on me and holding down the blankets so I couldn’t sit up. I finally started saying out loud, “Either tell me what you want or get out of here and leave me alone!” and when I did, I could get out of bed with no problems. My sister only had this happen a couple of times, and my son only once.

But once we had company in from Canada, and we didn’t tell her about our poltergeist. She slept in Jeremy’s room, and the next morning, we asked her how she slept. She replied, “Fine except for the cats that kept jumping on the bed and sitting on me. They got so bad that a couple of times they woke me up. But I couldn’t even get them to move off the covers and let me sit up. It was like I was pinned to the bed.” (She went to bed before us and woke after us, and her door was closed all night, so there was no way the cats could have gotten in the room she was using, not that they ever went in there anyway.)

There were frequent times that lights and other electrical appliances flipped off or on by themselves, and cabinet doors and dresser drawers would open when we weren’t home. And, of course the worms kept crawling in and dying.

Finally, I was home alone with my son one day. I was cooking and facing the stove when a tall lady with long black hair walked through the kitchen. Actually, she floated. I saw her out of the corner of my eye and thought at first it was my sister, but I was unsure of why she was home and how she’d gotten so tall. I turned around just in time to see her turn the corner where my son saw her seemingly pass through a wall and leave.

I didn’t get a chance to talk to my sister before my son and I left to run an errand. Meanwhile, my sister and a friend came home and they, too, witnessed the same tall, raven haired lady walk through the house and disappear. By the time the four of us got together that night and compared notes, it was quite creepy how similarly we’d all seen the same apparition. Not to mention the dead worms.

So, judge me if you will, but I know what we experienced, and it stopped as soon as we moved. In addition to being unnerving, it was actually quite stressful to say the least, and we were all happy to get out of there as soon as our lease was up!

So tell me, do you believe in ghosts or haunted houses? What would you have done if you moved into a house like the Slumlord’s House and encountered so many dead worms on a daily basis?

I’d have written a story about it. (Maybe tried to recruit the tall dark lady) I think it would be interesting to do a radon test on the house. This is based upon changes to the cats. I don’t think it influences doorbells.

You know, I never once realized that the worms should not have been crunchy yet until you said that, but I read your response to my sister and she had the same reaction as me: Thank God we didn’t think of that back then! We would have been even more freaked out, for sure! 🙂

When I moved into my current apartment, one of the first things I asked my new landlord was if the building was haunted. I’ve never experienced anything like what you describe, and I’d like to keep it that way.

LOL! Oh, no! I didn’t mean to scare you! 🙂 The first few times time she pinned me down, I was unnerved, but after I realized that if I yelled at her she got up, it was better. The bell was VERY annoying and the worms were just nasty! Plus being afraid for the cats. Good luck sleeping tonight! 😀

LOL! Yeah, they were BAD! I’ve watched some TV show about “true hauntings” several times since we moved out and learned that the pinning a person in bed is quite common (I had never heard of it before I experienced it), but I still haven’t heard of the worm thing. EWWW! 🙂

Yes and yes! Worms in general don’t bother me. Who knows how many dead worms day after dat would bother me … greatly. And I’d have pissed myself seeing the woman. I’ve no idea how you lasted that long, but my chicken self would have hauled it out of there at the first signs. Creepy, indeedy!

LOL! I am thankful that I only actually saw her the once. That was MORE than enough! Sometimes I drive by the house and wonder if anyone else has figured it out, but there are new tenants every few months. I don’t know if that’s because of the ghost or because of the scumbag landlord. 🙂

you know, I actually don’t think you’re crazy at all. My old apartment – the radio and t.v. would turn on in the middle of the night sometimes.. and I’d joke and say, “whatever spirit is in here playing around..LEAVE EVERYTHING OFF…I have to go to work in the morning”… my ex laughed at me and thought I WAS NUTS for talking to these spooks…I read somewhere that a lot of them – if spirits- are playful and just want to have fun and mess with people, they mean no harm… but shit, still spooky. In the old apartment also, my oldest daughter was about 4 at the time and kept talking to a “jackie”. I had no idea who JACKIE was but in her room, i’d hear her talking to this JACKIE person, laughing, and saying things like, “No, I can’t do that”, or laughing and saying “stop it jackie”… I would ask who Jackie was and she’d say “her”… but I didn’t see anyone… one day, she wouldn’t pick up her toys like I asked her to, and all of a sudden , she got upset and seemed angry. I asked why and she said Jackie yelled at her. I was soooo freaked out… and , once I was in the kitchen making dinner, and my daughter started laughing and looking PAST me and I asked why and she told me JACKIE was behind me making faces! Nice right???LOL… so, I do believe in this kind of thing ….I don’t like thinking about it, but I do believe in it… so it def. could have been “haunted”… and , the worms…. puke!!! Did you complain???

oh forgot to mention… an old lady died in my parent’s house before we moved there, and my dad use to always talk about the “old lady with the huntched back” and how she walked back and forth from the kitchen to my brothers and my room – it freaked me out and he use to tell me “she won’t hurt you… she’s checking on you guys..”… as I got older, I started thinking my dad was nuts, until the day I was in my parent’s room on the phone and noticed a dark weird looking shadow on the walls go by pretty fast and it looked just like a hooded huntched over SOMETHING…never harmful thou. I ran pretty quickly OUT of the room and told my mother, who also had heard stories of this old lady but never saw her. I remember telling my mother “she’s real!”…. LMAO… very true… but hell yeah, very spooky.

LOL, I don’t tell those stories often because I don’t want people looking at me like WTF? but… they are def. true and what’s even stranger… is that my daughter is now 13 and doesn’t rememeber that one bit but she laughs when I tell her how creepy it was. lmao…
maybe I will write a book after i finish the 2 I’m working on now 🙂

I’ve lived in two haunted houses, so the idea of having a resident ghost doesn’t faze me…but the dead worm thing? Oh hell no. With my luck it would have been spiders, and I would have promptly moved into a tent in the backyard. BLARGH!!!!!!!! -Kate

I completely believe in ghosts for sure. (My father who passed before I was born hangs out in my apartment I am pretty sure). The worm thing would have forced me out pretty quickly, that would just gross me out and made me go “Nope, we are out.”

Rachel – reading this I truly believe you have to face up to the fact that, in short, you are a ‘jinx.’ Sorry if the truth hurts yet the things that either follow you or you leave in your wake have led me to this conclusion! Another fascinating, fine post by the way.

Wow. That is scary. And bizarre. (This is only a theory, but apparently places with a sort of very low vibration called “infrasound” causes people to see, hear and feel strange things. It can also cause bleeding in the ears, though. It’s also possible that you’re simply more sensitive to the infrasound than your sister. It’s only a theory, though… And I know there are other things out there. My grandmother had to get my mom’s childhood home exorcised twice because someone had been practicing witchcraft there.)